At Wolff Olins London we are developing a series of LEARNSHOP sessions where we go out and explore an emerging technology, or bring experts in, or teach ourselves.
Last week, we tried rapid prototyping, courtesy of Chalk Studio Islington. We spent the week designing objects that would be useful to us in our daily lives at Regents Wharf. One was an innovation for the fabulous Honey Club, another was both a useful and aesthetic solution to ease our journey through our increasingly confidential work environments.
We were able to create, as a result of our design brainpower here, some beautiful and functional things that we hope to scale up and mass produce. But what we learnt along the way was just as rewarding.
Rapid Prototyping or 3D printing puts factory power in the hands of the individual. The technology itself does not seem so sophisticated. We printed off a non-electronic machine. It feels like a combination of knitting machine, photocopier and MRI scanning device. It will see your object design in negative space and then compose the form in plaster (in our case), or polymers, metal or chocolate – a wide variety of materials. Within the machine two flat beds sit proximate to each other. One moves over the other and over time, the object is built, micro-fine layer by micro-fine layer. From one of the beds of plaster dust, our beautiful object emerged as our expert, Mark, retrieved it, dusted it and hoovered it down. It was a joyful birthing process!
The brilliance of the technology is the idea behind it. Our modern age was so much about standardized processes and products, production line style. Rapid prototyping puts unlimited creative potential in our hands. It will allow us to create endlessly diverse and bespoke products, tweaked to our exact needs and living environments. But like all great technologies it is not it, itself, that is revolutionary (unless it starts to take on a life of its own…) - it is the uses that we put it to, the ideas that we materialise through it.
In this, it is setting us quite a challenge. 3D printing invites us to re-think our relationship with objects much as mass production did in the 50s. (And probably also with place, as we’ll able to produce anywhere, which could eventually put pay to our massive Asian outsourcing dependency.) We’ll need to be hugely creative to take the offer and meet its challenge.
But then again, it is not necessarily the case that 3D printing will wait for human intelligence to set the pace. The RepRap project at the University of Bath has been for some time producing 3D printers which manufacture the parts of other 3D printers – a impressive step towards self-replication. The bar is therefore set high. Should machines find such power and intelligence on their own, we may find ourselves falling behind in the creativity race.
For the meantime though, that appears to be some time away. Geniuses in various part of the world are putting 3D printing to monumental use- to open up access to tools and products in the developing world, to take airline manufacturing to the next highly bespoke level. And 3D printing, in conjunction with nanotechnology, is offering breakthroughs for our bodies- manufacturing skin cells and even organs for transplantation.
3D printing sets a new creative brief on an enormous scale.
Strategist Nick Keppel-Palmer is in Fast Company this morning writing about how “Boundaryless” businesses multiply value. A version of the article originally appeared as part of our annual Game Changers report.
Nick says: “The brands that will have the greatest impact on all our lives are those that see themselves not as citadels that need defending but as causes that need joining. The most important, most effective, most impactful brands are those that have put petty competition behind them and embraced collaboration as an operating principle—it is their core DNA. These brands are clear about their ambitions and are not shy about seeking out others who share those ambitions.”
The iPhone and many of its equivalents have generated a whole new perception of digital interaction. Finger-swiping and motion gesturing have greatly desensitized our understanding of these new technologies and enabled new purposes for mass digital interaction. The buck doesn’t stop there however—Mickey Mouse has just added a new angle to interactive technology.
Disney Research, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon and Tokyo University, just introduced a completely new method of digital interaction called Touché, which enables a wider gamut of information relay through touch. Touché works across all types of material, from existing touchscreens to more exotic items like doorknobs, your skin, and even water’s surface. See the video above for a richer explanation.
The understanding and range of these sorts of physical interactions will have huge implications and ripple effects. It will not only affect content structure and visual cues on your tablet, phone or Mp3 player, but also have a huge impact on our ability to decipher social understanding through body language and other parameters that our species has long taken for granted.
Touché works by sensing signals across a large range of frequencies — while the typical systems we know only pick up signal at a single frequency.According to Disney Research, this technology could soon enable embedding different commands for when a user pinches or grasps a hooked-up object.
In short, Disney has used zeros and ones to create a cross-platform game changing approach to people’s interactions with the objects in their lives.
This week, in his WSJ column, Ralph Gardner reckons with himself about why it’s taken him so long to get on Twitter and what motivates some of his younger reporter colleagues to tweet in earnest. “I appreciate there’s an ulterior motive here, though I can’t say I fully subscribe. It’s about growing the brand.”
Gardner admits slowly and begrudgingly that Twitter is useful. No doubt, the people and organizations who are active on social media truly do add viewers, readers, followers, etc. by extending their reach on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The point he seems to miss is that today’s media environment is a two-way street, where we’re all the source of each other’s truth. As everyone from brands and celebrities to consumers and Occupy protesters broadcast their opinions on Twitter, they are also taking in a gigantic stream of inputs from the people and groups they follow.
These new vehicles of communication and collaboration have created a host of new uses and users for brands to think about when they consider their offer and outreach. We can think of the traditional “UX” as a metaphor for brand interactions today, with “users” describing anyone who interacts with a company or personality through digital media or technology. In a journalist like Gardener’s case, you could use social media to source topics for future columns, learn about your audience’s interests, and end the week with a chat about the column you’ve produced.
In his book Users, Not Consumers: Who Really Determines The Success of Your Business, Aaron Shapiro, CEO of HUGE Inc wrote that users can sometimes be “more intimate with and influential on a company than anyone who has completed a purchase.” It takes Ralph Gardner a little longer to get to a similar conclusion, but he eventually says it: “It’s all about establishing your presence in the ether.”
Indeed, just being there (and being accessible to users of all sorts) is an important half of the battle. And that applies for both people and brands.
Last week at Wolff Olins New York we held an internal workshop to talk to our own strategists, designers and account managers about how they can develop their own personal online brands. Some were worried that they didn’t have much to say—nothing worthwhile that could be eloquently (or forcibly) expressed in 140 characters. While it’s always important to contribute smart things, develop a unique point of view, and create and curate content that communicates what you’re all about, our workshop stressed a more fundamental point: The first important move with social media is to just be there.
Being there lets you hear what people are saying. It makes you discoverable and accessible to a host of different users. And once you’re there, listening to others helps you figure out what you have to add.
The Yahoo! Advertising blog recently asked several agency leaders one question: “What are some key trends you’re seeing in political advertising this election season?” Angela Riley, Strategy Director for Wolff Olins, talked about what brands and politicians can learn from each other to better engage consumers—-and constituents.
Here’s a snippet from the piece:
For Politicians and Brands, It’s Essential to Be Clear, Consistent and Authentic.
Like a short-lived advertising campaign, political messaging platforms can evaporate into the ether without ever resonating with the voting public. Perhaps, like the all-too-common one-off approach of a glossy advertising campaign to appeal to an audience, politicians react to public sentiment and rush to get a message out before they’ve figured out what they really stand for.
Politicians can take a page from well-loved brands, which stand for something clear, authentic and desirable. Think Target and the democratization of chic, or BMW - the ultimate driving machine. Think too of the Obama-Biden presidential campaign of 2008 standing for “Hope” and “Change” — similarly clear, authentic and hugely desirable (given the public sentiment at the time).
So how can a political candidate get at the authentic, aspirational heart of what they stand for? Keep reading the full piece here.
We know that the New York Times are infographics geniuses. They visualize data to track sentiment on a topic, while inviting you to participate in the conversation or even start a new one. Sorting features allow you to find “your people” and compare ideas.
The one above was an instant response to an extremely timely topic—that’s NYT’s bread and butter—but it’s a lesson for other brands who trade in social currency.
From media to retail to cultural institutions to healthcare, creating timely, engaging experiences like this can keep your finger on the pulse of what your consumers are thinking, helping you stay relevant and useful.
The other day I sat in a brainstorm with a bunch of fellow graphic designers, discussing the future direction of an international business. Someone in the team made a flippant joke about the moment: Most of us had gone to art school, not business school.
As designers we sometimes worry about engaging in the “business side” of things. But today’s businesses are desperate to find experimental and creative solutions and designers are just the problem-solvers they need. We’ve been trained to take a brief, assess the problem, instinctively create different directions, analyse the positives and negatives, reject one, create another, see what works, see what doesn’t.
We can rapidly create visual concepts that test how products, communications, experiences and interfaces can work together. And we can test multiple directions. It allows businesses to take risks they couldn’t imagine, because they can see tangible possibilities. That, is business prototyping.
There’s an opportunity now as designers to get beneath the veneer of subjective aesthetics and establish design, and design thinking, at the heart of tomorrow’s businesses – an opportunity we should grab with both hands.
So, am I a graphic designer anymore?
Campbell Butler is a Senior Designer at Wolff Olins.
I just came across an interesting story that involves Dali creating the design of the Chupa Chups lollipop mark. Chupa Chups started off under the name “GOL,” imagining the candy as a soccer ball and the open mouth a net. The name then evolved to “Chupa Chups,” from the Spanish chupar, meaning “to suck.” The lollipop, invented in 1958 and the first candy ever to be sold on a stick, is a bona-fide design classic. What I didn’t know was that its famous daisy logo was sketched on a newspaper and designed by none other than Dali, who insisted that his design be placed on top of the lolly, rather than the side.
After discovering this bit of the story, it instantly changed my perception of Chupa Chups. Not only does it reiterates the huge importance of storytelling in creating brands, it makes you realise that the mark placement is an integral part of the brand and probably a game changer in its time. Not to forget that the association with Dali adds a lot to the table - think Campell’s and Andy Warhol!
Naturally, I couldn’t stop myself from imagining Dali trying it out, I bet it suited his mustache. Wow - could it be that Dali and I have shared a similar experience!
The book that first got me interested in the whole idea of management was Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence, and one of its mantras was ‘stick to the knitting.’ But is that still good advice, 30 years on? Kodak, Xerox, Nokia, Kmart and Blockbuster all did, and look what’s happened to them. By sticking to their core activity, they failed to react to rivals coming from somewhere else. Google, on the other hand, has moved from its original search-engine knitting into every other handicraft, including self-driving cars.
We explored this topic at a breakfast discussion I hosted last week, exploring our view of the five habits that make 21st century businesses game-changing – which include ‘experimental’ and ‘value-creative’, by which we mean constantly searching for new strategies and revenue streams.
It’s also the topic of Repeatability by Chris Zook and James Allen, two consultants from Bain & Company. They say, in contrast: identify your core, simplify it, and repeat it.
So who’s right? We asked our excellent breakfast panellists came from Zipcar, Zopa and Google. Their view was that experimentation has always been important, and that the Internet now makes it easy to test new things very rapidly, with a huge population of testers. They believe that this kind of testing is natural to a 21st-century business, and that it’s so common that fear of failure – indeed, use of the word ‘failure’ – hardly exists any more. They also say that open experimentation – trying things out in the marketplace – is a great way to be transparent, to involve customers, and so to earn trust.
Where they differ depends on the life stage of their business. In the early years, they say, experiment around the edges until your core idea is proved, but stick to the core idea. ‘It’s a big enough battle,’ said one, ‘to establish our model’. In older age (and Google is a geriatric 14 years old), it become OK to experiment more widely and more radically. ‘Google is always in beta,’ said a panellist.
All three panellists, though, agreed that fruitful experimentation needsto be driven by a purpose. And that purpose can be hugely ambitious: Zipcar has its eyes on the day when there are more car sharers than owners, and Zopa on the moment when peer-to-peer loans outnumber bank loans. Zipcar, Zopa and Google all want to change the world for the better.
So maybe the answer to the conundrum is that Tom Peters was right. You do need to stick to the knitting – but don’t think of your knitting as your activity (which should change over time), but your purpose (whichshouldn’t).
We post this in tribute to Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century. His books were essential ingredients of our childhood. Some of his brilliance and irreverence is captured above.
